The Road Back to Douglas, Arizona

On my mother, her father Jesús Tarra Lazos, and my great-grandmother Natalia Lopez Trujillo

This morning I woke up at 2:00 a.m. I had gone to bed early, and at that strange, quiet hour I found myself sitting up in the dark, looking through genealogy records for my great-grandmother, Natalia Lopez Trujillo.

I wanted to know where she lived. The exact day she died. Where she is buried. And then, the way these things go, I fell down the rabbit hole and started looking for my grandfather, Jesús Tarra Lazos. Someone had posted a photograph of his headstone on one of those sites. His name was spelled wrong. Most of the names in these records are spelled wrong. On my father’s side I can trace the family back to Europe. On my mother’s side the paper trail is thin, scattered, misspelled, almost as if it was never meant to hold us.

But we have never relied on paper. We rely on our stories.

And I remember every single one my mother told me.

A Woman of Few Words

My mother was an extraordinary human being. She raised eight children by herself. She came from a very large family, and her mother came from a very large family. She was stubborn and proud, and if you crossed her, it took a lot for her to open back up to you. She didn’t like chisme. She wasn’t one to gossip. She was a woman of few words, and she had a look on her face that communicated everything.

She kept her circle small and tight. I don’t know everything that happened in her life to make her that way. But if you were inside that circle, it was full of love. She was not perfect, nowhere near it. But when you come to understand the life she lived and the childhood she came from, you see her differently. As adults, she and I became best friends. Being her caregiver in the last three or four years of her life was the most extraordinary experience of mine.

When I think about who made her who she was, I think of two people: her father, and her grandmother.

Her Father

I never knew my grandfather. He died in his thirties in Cochise County, Arizona. But my mother was very close to him, and she carried his stories her whole life.

She told me that when she was little he would play the drums and sing, and he would sit her on his lap, and the world was good.

Then he died.

The story, as I understand it, is that my grandmother had left him by then and moved to Chandler, Arizona, and my mother and her sister Susan were still with him when word got out that he had died. I don’t know much more than that. My mother never filled in the details, and I have learned to respect the parts of a story that are kept quiet.

What I do know is this: whenever she talked about her father, her whole face lit up. He passed his Indigenous roots on to her and told her never to move away from them. She was the rebel of the family, the black sheep, the one who pushed back against a lot of what her mother believed. I think part of that rebellion was loyalty to him. And she passed what he gave her down to me.

My company, Tarra Lazos Creative, carries his name. Every time I write it, I am saying it out loud for him.

Her Grandmother

My great-grandmother, Natalia Lopez Trujillo, was there when my grandfather died. She comforted my mother, and she helped figure out how to get the girls back to my grandmother in Chandler. My mother’s sister Susan went back. My mother refused to go. She was just a little girl, and already as stubborn as she would be her whole life. She stayed in Douglas and lived with her grandmother, and that is where she was raised. My mother always credited her grandmother with raising her. She adored her.

Natalia’s own story begins in fire. Her village in Mexico was burned, and she and her cousin, just young girls, made their way north to Douglas, Arizona. She married and raised children, and when she and her husband decided to separate, he went back to his family’s village in Mexico. She stayed in Douglas and made her way in this world by herself.

She raised her own farm animals and grew her own food. She was a partera, a midwife, who brought babies into the world. She was a curandera who knew plant medicine. She cared for her neighbors and she fed people. And she made mezcal. She had a still, and it was strictly off-limits to my mother, which of course meant my mother snuck in. She told me those stories with so much delight.

I remember her too. As a little boy, my mother would load all of us into the Ford Country Squire station wagon and drive from Chandler all the way to Douglas. My great-grandmother didn’t speak a word of English. When we walked in, she would light up. She was tiny, maybe four foot eight, and sweet as could be. I would run up and grab her, and she always had her apron on, a checkered one with flowers embroidered across the front, and her pockets always had treats in them. Out of those pockets she’d pull a handful of piñones, and those were our treats.

Her home was a small adobe house, patched together from brick and remnants, whatever was at hand. She had a Chihuahua that never stopped barking and a parrot that talked to her in Spanish. I was fascinated by her.

I noticed something else, even as a child. My mother had a strained relationship with her own mother, and at my grandmother’s house I could tell she couldn’t wait to leave. But at my great-grandmother’s house she relaxed. She wanted to take a nap. She was home.

Now, as a grown man, I understand what I was seeing. My mother learned how to be a human being through two people: her father and her grandmother.

The Trees She Planted

My mother was a prolific gardener. When I think of her hands, I see her sitting at the table peeling an orange, or cutting into a mango, and saving the seeds. She was a seed saver. She would plant those seeds and turn them into something. She grew trees from seed all over the East Valley, wherever she lived: oranges, mangoes, papaya. She literally loved to have her feet in the dirt.

Toward the end of her life she was in a wheelchair, and I would take her out for walks. One day I decided to take her around to see the trees she had planted. Trees that started as seeds on a kitchen table, still standing, still growing, still feeding someone.

By the time she died, she had dozens, upon dozens of grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. We lost count. Whenever a new baby came into the family, one of the first things she would do was take them outside to plant strawberries. I remember the little ones jumping up and running out to the yard to see if a strawberry had grown yet. When they finally ripened, she would sit and eat them with the kids. She wanted those children to understand their food, where it comes from, and how to grow it.

Like I said, she didn’t say a lot. But you could look at her garden and know she was connected to something. The source, whatever the source may be.

Dinner After the Trees

The day I took her to see her trees, we got back home in the evening and I made dinner. That was something I had to earn. My mother never let anyone cook for her, but she trusted my cooking. She sat in her recliner while I stood at the stove, and I was talking to her about the edible and medicinal plants of the Sonoran Desert, about what I was learning alongside the plants, and from them.

At some point I turned around from the stove and she had gone quiet. Her face had fallen, and she looked worried.

I asked her what was the matter.

“Listening to you,” she said, “you scare me right now.”

I asked her why.

“You remind me of my father and my grandmother.”

Both of them had been gone for many years. I turned off the stove, went over, sat down next to her, and held her. I told her, “Well, Mom, spirit is always present, I think you are feeling them, They are with us right now.”

She teared up. “Mijo, I am afraid to die. What do you think happens to us?”

I held her quietly for a few moments before I answered. “Mom, I am afraid of you dying too. I don’t know how to feel. I feel untethered.”

Then I told her that whatever was coming for us, we would face it together. And I told her she was a gift to me in this world.

She was in the last stage of her life then. I think about that evening often. The woman of few words who never let anyone cook for her let me feed her, and let me hold her while she said the hardest thing out loud. And in that moment, without meaning to, I had brought her father and her grandmother into the room. Everything they knew about plants and the land and how to care for people had made its way down through her, and into me.

La Virgen

My mother was not a churchgoer. Her spirituality was her own, and it was deep. She was a Guadalupana, devoted to the Virgin of Guadalupe, as was her mother, and her grandmother. I believe that devotion goes all the way back to Tonatzin, (the Sacred Mother)  through every grandmother before them, to Mexica times, when the sacred was present in women’s daily lives.

She taught me how to build altars and what they mean. There was always a small one burning in her bedroom. When times were hard I could hear her praying, and smell the smoke. She was not loud about what she believed, but her beliefs were strong.

Back to the Borderlands

So why is all of this rising up in me now?

I was recently at Camp Naco for its opening, in Cochise County, about six hundred yards from the border. Douglas is about thirty minutes away. I started thinking about Douglas. I recently met with the tourism representative for the City of Douglas about some possible programming there, and I realized I haven’t been back since my great-grandmother passed away.

Funny how life brings things back around. Cochise County, where my grandfather died. Douglas, where my great-grandmother made a life out of nothing and raised my mother. The borderlands are calling me home.

Love Is What’s Left

Día de los Muertos is almost here. Maybe that’s why all of this came up at two in the morning. It’s the time of year when the people we’ve lost feel closest, and lately mine have felt very close.

As I write this, and I’ve had to stop a few times to wipe my eyes. I can feel my mother. I can feel my great-grandmother, my grandmother and my father too. Somewhere along the way I came to believe that when we cross over, everything else falls away and the love is what stays.

So I wanted to put some of it down here, before the day got busy and the feeling passed.

If you’ve read this far, maybe someone came to mind. A grandmother with something in her apron pocket, an uncle who sang, a parent who said very little and still told you everything. If so, I hope you’ll ask about them while there’s still someone to ask, and write down what you remember, even if it’s only a little. The records will get some of it wrong. Ours did. The stories are how we hold on to the rest.

I’ll be going back to Douglas soon. I’ll let you know what I find.

Jeffrey.